On Smoking'

Quite unlike many others, smoking is a diehard sport. The player wages all, and winning is obvious to no one, but the player. Most of the reasons rushed forth in favor of taking up such a mortal blood-sport are said to be found in an irresistible desire to emulate, to imitate your movie-stars and your elders generally, and more specifically, that man in your family who answers by the shout of “dad” or “papa”. In that sense, smoking is a spectator sport too. We love watching people smoke; on screen, off it too, very likely within pages, and simply in photographs, preferably black and white. Albert Camus earned himself a reputation of being more than a philosopher, only by striking that dashing pose with that Gauloise, just little more than a butt, impaled between his lips, and a cloud of smoke around his left temple. Certainly The Marlboro Man of the intelligentsia. Nothing absurd about that.

I am a smoker. A daily wager of my share of healthiness. Unlike chain-smokers, my hours not minutes, are celebrated by that ritual of lighting up the butt-opposite end of cigarette, which is never before tapping the tawny filter against any hard surface, making the tobacco leaves hug one another in a tight squeeze and leaving the other end of the roll a bit empty, ideal for burning. A lit match to the scepter of my passion, which is then followed by intermittent sips from that barrel of pure poison, till there’s nothing left of it. Gore Vidal once said that “the only disadvantage of watching porn is that it makes you wanna watch more porn”. The axiomatic ruling here befits the addiction of smoking as well. Smoking makes you wanna smoke more, like that character in one of Martin Amis novel who wants to smoke a cigarette even when he’s smoking one already.

Smoking is more than addiction, it’s true love, which is rare among humans. It reminds one of those helpless lovers who keep going back to their objects of desire despite being bullied and insulted by those unrequiting partners. Effects of smoking are thus, total. Mental and physical. Moreover, when calculated the worth of fags in monetary terms, the cost which comes up for a lifetime of smoking can go as high as the price of a bungalow or a small yacht for a city-slicker-smoker. Exaggerated I know, but it’s true that cigarettes burn holes in places other than in your body also, no serious smoker would contest that. But it’s rude to talk about one’s love’s worth in terms of money, what smoking ‘gives’ me or ‘takes away’ from me is incomparable. What it gives me can include a series of preambular terms which are apt to be inserted before the constitution of a small smokers’ club, like ‘camaraderie’, ‘self-worth’, ‘courage’, and a sense of being a true ‘social-democrat’, while what it takes away, or eventually will take away from me can only.. Let’s just not go there.

There are a very few pals one can have in his life which cling to him more dearly than that pen of poison clad in ghostly white. I know many people who would want to just hold a cigarette even when they’re not smoking it, moving it up and down and sideways as they dance their hands during an animated conversation. I do it, though not so frequently. The idea is to smoke as you talk, creating a smoke screen through which you converse. Longer conversations require frequent lighting ups and when you have not one in your hand, the new-found freedom of your index and middle finger from chronic disjointedness sends a message to your brain, a painful message as if suffering from the memory of a phantom limb, and then your brain tells to you light up, and you do it pronto to ease the pain, by adding an extra finger to your paw. Gordon Comstock, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a typical Orwellian character, takes measure of his poverty in terms of number of cigarettes left on him, lamenting at one point that he has only four cigarettes to last till the salary day. It’s a good measure; one can employ this in many other vocations, like measuring conversations. A conversation, if it lasts till the smoke lasts, tends to be a good banter, short but not slapdash. So, it’s advisable to race your chats against the approach of the burning ring of the cigarette to your lips, and if you do feel like lighting another one then it means that you want to chat more, that way, it’s a pretty good measure.

I know cigarettes are lethal to one’s well-being, certainly bad for those bird-less wings trapped inside our chest known as lungs. Every time I cough, it’s those wings clamoring to fly away, tormented as they are for having constantly to live under a dark fog. There are other indicators too which remind one of one’s fallibility, only this time caused by that incessant puffing. Indicators like those moments when even a short sprint makes your heart race a ferocious gallop for minutes, before slowly receding to a canter, and eventually to its natural tip-toe of a dressage horse. But the first of that three-phase act is dreadful. The longer you have been smoking, the lengthier that first one-third spell of deathliness tends to get.

Smoking is a bad habit. Just like any other. But unlike obesity or hypertension and other so called ‘preventable causes’ of death, smoking doesn’t give you guilt pangs, as one is ever too ready even in the face of morbidity to steal a couple of puffs from another smoking friend. Such naivete may make smokers look like daring fools, but one can’t judge whether after all those decades of heavy incendiary, the smoker finally loses everything in his death. The self-righteous ones make a show of how cigarettes are bad and what not to their friends and family and give a short shrift to one’s true freedom, which is freedom to annihilate oneself, whereas at any rate it’s a trade-off, a deal between smoker and his smokes. No third party can figure out whether it’s a bad deal or a good deal, or if it’s a trade-off worth going for. What matters most in the end is one’s personal liberty. After all, there’s something beautiful about the luminosity which comes on burning the candle at both ends.

(This article is an opinion piece that appears on Young Citizen).